


We're Just Two Lost Souls (Swimming in a Fishbowl)

by quicksloanesilver



Series: Wish You Were Here [2]
Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-18
Updated: 2020-03-23
Packaged: 2021-02-28 22:28:45
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,273
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23194759
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quicksloanesilver/pseuds/quicksloanesilver
Summary: Main story of the "Wish You Were Here" series, which began with my prologue fic "So You Think You Can Tell." Yeah yeah, it's a cheap trick with the Pink Floyd song, ik.Anyways. When the Inquisitor gets inadvertently banished to some other realm- the Fade? the Void? whatever it may be - she must find some way not only to escape, but to keep her sanity and survive the day.
Series: Wish You Were Here [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1667563
Comments: 1
Kudos: 9





	1. Second Time's the Charm: Ch. I (Brief)

The second time she plunges through the Veil is no kinder. The fabric of the world tears and gnaws at her then, deciding it wasn’t liking the taste, spits her out with the kinetic force only a world like Thedas can muster. Time and space crashes around her battered, all too physical form with vicious severity, sending her through curling eddies and flows of warped matter. Like rushing water, it pushes her with a buoyant force from one corner of the world to the next, dragging her under and below.

The whole time, all Sloane thinks is oh fuck. Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck. Oh no. Shit. Oh fuck. Oh god. Oh no. No. Fuck. Fuck. Hell. And so on.  
When she finally lands, mere seconds or hours or eternities later, there is nothing to cushion her fall. In fact, there’s barely anything at all: she’s surrounded on all sides by open space, endless desert, all that same hue of nagging green that’s seared into her brain. When she rolls over onto her back and looks up, it is pure, infinite black. Whether that is preferable to the green of the earth (if you can call it that) around her is debatable.

Looking up at that empty night sky, Sloane feels a coursing pain steadily growing in her body, as if her senses are finally catching up to all that has happened to them so far. With that all-encompassing body-ache, her mind sluggishly puts it all together. There was Corypheus, pressed beneath the point of her dagger. The orb, slipping out of his grasp. It’s destruction. Solas. Cassandra, shouting something. And then green, so much green… and everything else around her, still so green.

Oh fuck.


	2. Green: Ch. II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Waking up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey all, so yeah, this probably isn't the most exciting thing/what you were necessarily expecting, idk. I do promise that I'll try to get something a little more fan-servicey up sometime this month, though.

This must be the Fade, right? Granted, Sloane doesn’t really, technically know what the Fade _actually_ looks like, strictly speaking. Veritably so. But it was, after all, pretty green and… green, in the game, so that’s probably a marker for what it’s like in real life, right? 

That would, however, also lead to the pretty unpleasant conclusion that, if this is the Fade, then Sloane is in it. In the Fade. And though she may not be a native Thedian, or Thedasite, or Thedas-whatever, she did know that it was a very, very bad thing to be in the Fade. Physically, that is. 

The next ladder-step in this elegant chain of reasoning then goes: if this is the Fade, and she is physically in it, and it is bad to be physically in it, then she should leave. Speedily. As soon as she can. 

If she can get up, that is, because throughout all of these delicate pirouettes of logical thinking Sloane’s physical form has been able to do little else than simply lie wetly on the ground beneath her. Even that was a challenge, in fact; it feels as if you need a certain level of physical ability to maintain the presence of truly “lying” somewhere. It’s a verb, after all, and implies a certain level of action. And at this moment Sloane was, more likely than not, engaging with the very opposite of action. Every muscle, from the familiar comfort of her neck and shoulders to the unknown minutiae of her lower back, had gone completely slack. She was possessed with a profound level of inertia she had never felt before, and even the tiny momentum of breathing seemed gone for her: air simply existed in her lungs, or maybe her lungs simply existed around the air inside them. 

Besides, as incredible as the proportions of this heavy, exhausting, dulling inertia may have been, Sloane could hardly appreciate them due to the immense physical hurt she was being put through. Every inch of her being was on fire. She felt as if she was laid out on a chiropractor’s table, moments after getting her spine reset by that severe kind of semi-professional who pursues such a line of work, with that dull reverberating pain slipping through her entire body. In a way that really is what happened. Only what was reset was not her spine, but every individual atom of her existence, each nerve ending snapped back into shape. 

She could just walk it off. If she were currently able to walk, that is. 

As it were, she was condemned to simply lie there (or, excuse me, anti-lie there) and stare up at the blackness spread out above her. It was a complete sheet of deep black. Deep, complete sheet. Deep, complete, sheet. Black. Little else to say on that. It’s a big void, to be sure. She wonders how long it stretches out for. From here she can almost imagine that she is back home, lying on her back on some desert or beach or meadow or other comforting landscape (how comforting in comparison to this!), looking up at the endless night sky of Earth. Maybe it’s just early evening, and the stars haven’t quite come out yet, and the velvet black above is suddenly just so familiar, and can’t you hear the dim thrum of highway traffic just a few feet away? 

It’s a cloudy night too, she wants to remark. No moon. And God, what that light pollution is doing to our skies. Tragic. For a moment she imagines what the sky must be like in Death Valley or the middle of Australia or the North Pole, and wants to tell someone that imagination. 

An hour or so later she realizes, with a growing dread, that the edges of her vision are tainted with green. Like a mist, the color was ever-so-slowly climbing up from the ground, suffusing itself onto the dark plush of the sky. Even now curls and wisps of it taunted her vision. Never when she looked straight at it, perhaps, but stare too long at the dark and… It was hollow, yes. Dark and cold and empty. Not an Earth sky at all; no, it was dirty and green, as if rubbed with dirt, and it was disgusting and alien and wrong. And with cold dread Sloane realizes that those curls and wisps of green must be climbing up, and they must be climbing up over _her_ as well, and now she can feel the faint cloak of mist around her. It settles coldly onto her collarbone, over her nose and eyes, cold and green and gross, so gross gross gross. 

She bolts upright even as her joints sing, every muscle tensed for what feels like the first time in millennia, and pushes herself off of the slimy green ground (ew) and takes off. 

It hurts to run, it hurts so much, but she feels gripped with such an inexplicable and deep irritation that she knows she can’t do anything else. Her feet fall against the ground with vicious strides, each hit sending shards of feeling up her leg, while all the while the air swims over her skin. She closes her eyes to stop the green, to stop seeing the swaying palette of color in front of her, to stop feeling it push against her chest and hands as she runs. 

It does help a little, the darkness of her closed eyelids, even as a nagging understanding at the back of her mind knows that the world around her hasn’t changed. Still, Sloane hopes to push it back, to break free of that cloying sense of green as she runs faster and faster, spurring herself on, lungs and muscles pure fire, forever running-

Until she trips on some rock or imperfection, sent sprawling over the cold ground. She pants against it. It is, of course, green. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just realized that me writing about the frightening mundanity of being stuck someplace is... closer to life than I would have liked. Hope you are all staying sane this quarantine, loves!

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not gonna lie, this is kind of an ambitious writing project for me, so you might have to bear with me as I work out a lot of things. But I'm hoping, really hoping, that I can make something great out of it.


End file.
